Two Roads
by aljanny
Summary: A routine hunt spins out of control, leaving confusion in its wake.


_A routine hunt spins out of control, leaving confusion in its wake_

**Disclaimer: The Winchester brothers belong to Kripke and the CW network. I am obviously neither, just harmlessly entertaining myself (and perhaps others) through writing.**

Takes place any time before AHBL, way back in seasons one and two (though, I suppose it could fit anywhere in the timeline, really).

* * *

><p>Sam is both groggy and grouchy.<p>

He is headed back to the motel, two coffees and a bag of bagels gripped in hand, and it is way too early to be doing this, and why didn't he take the car?

Actually, it really is a good thing he didn't take the car - there is a heck of a lot of traffic on the road for the early hour (Sam surmises it is probably an accident by the way the cars have collected up, and the number of disgruntled drivers starting to crane their heads out their windows.) Sam understands their annoyance. It is far too early to be dealing with anything. He's tired and sore, and he can feel a headache settling into a nauseating rhythm behind his eyes. It had been such a long night. A long night, and now it's morning, and Sam still hasn't slept yet.

Yesterday's case had been a pretty cut and dry haunting. In and out - or at least it was supposed to be. Even with everything laid out as simply as can be (find the grave, dig the grave, salt the bones - simple, simple, simple), they still couldn't catch an easy one.

Dean was the first to be tossed, back into a gravestone, curling in on himself, out cold. Sam figures he should start taking a tally of the number of times a Winchester has met a gravestone via an angry spirit. It'd be a fun drinking game, except it really wouldn't. God, he's so tired of this. So tired, and their cases never end, will never end. There's always another and another and another.

Sam was luckier than Dean, and was able to dissipate it with a blast of rock salt before it could fling him too, but the spirit's violent charge still left him overbalancing, limbs flailing as he fell backward into the open grave, catching his head on the coffin in a swift burst of pain and darkness.

He had found himself waking in a grave, on top of the very bones he was supposed to be torching (not high on his list of the things he had wanted to experience - waking up in a coffin with a rotted-out corpse). However, it did not seem as though he had been out for too long, and the spirit was only just reappearing, and he was able to haul himself out of the grave and send the bones up in flames before it could retaliate.

Sam had hardly felt triumphant, though - it had been able to do more than enough damage already. Dean was awake, but incoherent, and Sam was pretty sure he had cracked a rib or two, and getting him back to the car was an absolute bitch - especially when his own legs were not too steady and his vision was doubling. Then, there was the matter of filling the grave (because, in the Winchesters' line of work, if nothing seemed to be punctured, then cracked or broken ribs didn't qualify as enough of an emergency to ditch an obviously desecrated grave for a hospital trip). After that, he had to see about getting them back to the motel room for some stitching and bandaging.

So, Sam has a right to be cranky this morning. By the time all of those things were checked off his list, the sun was glittering through the blinds and his empty stomach had him stumbling out to find coffee and breakfast.

Sam opens the motel room door now and finds Dean propped up in bed, flicking through television stations. The left side of Dean's face is swollen and purpling from where it connected with granite, and he keeps a protective arm curled around his midsection.

Sam tosses the bag of bagels to his brother, and sets the coffees carefully down on the nightstand.  
>Dean questions him about the night before - it's all a haze to him - and Sam does his best to answer coherently. Dean has left off channel surfing at a particularly grating commercial, and it's twisting at Sam's frayed nerves, gnawing at his headache. He just wants to lay down on the awful, flowered bedspread and sleep forever.<p>

This apparently is not an option, though, as Dean starts waxing on about these mysterious deaths and missing persons he'd seen on the local news, and then it's not long before Sam finds himself standing at the door of a bland, picket-fenced house, business-suited. Dean is ringing the doorbell over and over, and no one is answering, and why are they here and why is Dean out of bed? Because he's a stubborn ass, Sam's mind supplies, and this new case couldn't wait a few hours for him to catch up on sleep, and as cliché as it sounds, it really feels like his limbs are made of lead.  
>But, people are disappearing and dying (as usual), and this one will not wait.<p>

They pick the lock, and duck inside, and Dean takes the main level, and Sam takes the second floor, and they search the house. It's all so normal, so routine, right up until the blood starts dripping from the ceiling. Dripping, raining, pouring from the entire ceiling. The room is filled with the sound of splashing blood, and Sam shouts down the stairs for Dean, and by the time Dean makes it up (huffing and puffing, face a chalky white color), Sam thinks he's about ready to vomit from the overpowering stench of it all.

"What a mess." Dean says, grimacing.

Sam agrees.

They search everywhere, but can't find where it's coming from - there is no attic, nothing on the roof. The room itself is bleeding. Sam and Dean are now covered in it, and Sam finds that he suddenly can't take the sticky feeling of his suit clinging to his skin, and he whips off his suit jacket and flings it from himself, then he is dashing down the stairs, running, and then he is on the lawn, looking up at the sky.

"What a mess." Dean says from somewhere next to him, and Sam's imagination fills in a grimace.

Sam agrees.

"We need to research more. But, first I really, really need a nap and a shower." Sam is so tired that he feels like he really couldn't move his limbs if he tried. So, he doesn't. The lawn is the perfect place for a nap, and the sky is so blue, and Dean is right there next to him.

"Wake up, Sammy." Dean's tone is the no-nonsense one he uses when he thinks he needs to sound like Dad, and Sam almost thinks about pushing himself up, but, really, Dean is being so bossy, it can wait. Sam didn't want to leave the motel room in the first place. The sky above is so blue, it's so blue, and then suddenly it's raining.

"What a mess." Dean says, and Sam really agrees.

What a mess, and there is blood coming from the sky instead of rain, and suddenly he thinks he knows where the blood has been coming from this whole time, and it's hilarious really. The sky killed those people; they are going to have to hunt the sky.  
>Sam doesn't think their guns are big enough to hunt the sky, and he tells Dean so. Dean says something in response, and it's garbled and weird, and Sam flops his head over to look at his brother.<p>

Dean is sitting next to him on the lawn, and his mouth is open, and he's making a horrible, grating noise, and Sam covers his ears.

"Stop, Dean! My head!"

But, the noise goes on, and gets louder, and he closes his eyes and curls inward. He can hear Dean saying something, shouting over the grating sound, and Sam has to wonder how Dean can talk while he is making that terrible noise. And Dean's chanting now, what a mess, what a mess, what a mess. Sam can feel the lawn vibrating. The lawn is vibrating, and Sam just wants it to stop.

And then it's not, and Dean's not, and the sky's not, and Sam's back at the graveyard, and he is just finishing up the grave. He staggers back to the car and tosses their shovels in the trunk. Blood stands out against the door handle, and he stares at it for a full minute, watching it well up and drip to the ground, molasses-slow. He blinks to clear his mind and fumbles into the front seat. He can feel blood running from a gash on the side of his head, sticking his hair to his face, and he should probably stitch that up when they get back to the motel room. Dean is laid out on the back seat, his arms folded on his stomach, face pale, eyes closed.

"What a mess," Dean says, and his mouth doesn't move.

Sam starts to agree with him, but the car is vibrating like the lawn now, and Sam is very carefully trying to steer it out of the cemetery without hitting the tombstones, so he forgets that he's saying anything at all.

They almost make it to the motel room before Sam figures out that the car is driving into the sky. All he can see out of the windshield is blue, bright blue. It's daytime again. The sky fractures, and he can see where the blood was leaking from before. It's dripping from the spiderwebbed cracks, and down onto his face. Sam feels like he's being baptized again. (This is the third time Sam's been baptized, if you can call it that - being woken by blood dripping onto his face is getting really old.)

The screeching sound is back, and it brings the vibrating with it, and Sam reluctantly lolls his head left. Someone is sawing at the door of the Impala, and the terrible metal-on-metal sound fills his everything. There is a pressure on his stomach, and his head lolls around to the other side. Dean is standing next to him (standing on what?) and he's sideways, and he's clutching his ribs, and the left side of his face is swollen and purpling. Sam looks down at himself, and sees Dean's other hand, pressing over the spot where a piece of metal seems to be intersecting with Sam's stomach. Sam's clothes are sticking to his sides, and he decides that the ceiling really wasn't bleeding, it's him. He's bleeding, and his head hurts, and he can't seem to make his limbs move, but he's not sure he was ever even trying.

Dean's saying something that Sam can't hear, and he hopes it isn't "What a mess", because Sam won't be able to find his mouth to tell Dean that he really, really agrees. If ever there was a definition of 'mess', this would be it.

Then, strangers are removing the door, and putting a neck brace around his neck, and sliding him out of the seat, and he really doesn't want to leave Dean standing in the broken car with that broken expression on his face, but nobody asks what Sam wants.

Now, suddenly, he's staring at another ceiling, and it sways back and forth and wails at him, and he closes his eyes to keep from throwing up. People are moving around him, pressing on his stomach, and some detached part of him thinks he might be in an ambulance. This doesn't bother him as much as it probably should.

Something pricks in his arm, and then he's floating.

* * *

><p>When Sam wakes up again, everything is still.<p>

No people, no sawing, no rain. There is a ceiling spread above him, but it's white and clean and bare.

He looks heavily to the side - nothing. To the other side - nothing.

Nothing he's looking for, anyway. There's a bunch of machines, most of them either whirring or beeping, and all of them hooked up to him in some way, but Sam is so goddamn used to waking up in hospitals that he's actually surprised at how unsurprised he is.

Dean is conspicuously missing, and Sam starts to worry that he's somewhere, hurt and alone. He remembers that the last time he saw Dean, he was standing in the broken, sideways shell of the Impala. Sam starts to try to pull himself up, but his limbs won't move (again, still) and the effort just leaves his head spinning.

He lies back quickly, waiting until the room settles.

And then Dean is there, pushing the door open, casually holding a cup of coffee. He's dressed in scrubs, and Sam can see where the bandaging around his ribs bulges out. His skin is so pale. The pattern of bruising on his face stands out like the contrast of night and day.  
>Sam can't begin to express his relief. So, he listens to Dean express his own brand of relief instead - snarky and light and not-at-all-worried-why-would-you-think-that?<p>

Dean tells Sam that he crashed the car ("…and she was a mess, Sammy, a real mess"), and Sam strains to fill in the blank spots in his memory. He finally puts together the spirit throwing them around in the graveyard, Sam driving them back toward the motel, then swerving and crashing into a ditch (trying to drive them home with a head wound - stupid, stupid, stupid). He apologizes in a rush, and Dean looks aghast and tells him not to be stupid, to calm down.

Sam does.

Because Dean's alive, and Sam's alive, and there's no blood dripping from the ceiling, and Sam can't help but take solace in that. As long as the two of them keep on going on, everything in the world can be (will be) fixed.

Sam is sure of it.


End file.
